Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) railed against the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” armed with evidence of government censorship and new legislation aimed at gutting government censorship once and for all.
Hageman called for Congress to pass a bill she co-sponsored with Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) —the “Censorship Accountability Act” during a Feb. 29 hearing before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Hageman went on a tear against agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that had sought to suppress Americans’ freedom of speech. “These bureaucrats continue to grow in size and power and are beginning to increasingly wield this power against the American people they were intended to serve,” Hageman said, before introducing her solution. “The Censorship Accountability Act finally brings accountability for violations of our First Amendment rights, the ones which are the most fundamental to our freedom,” she continued. Hageman reasoned that there was simply “no reason federal officials are held to a lower standard than state and local officials especially when the stakes are this high.”
Hageman added, “I hope all members of this committee support this legislation. The legislative branch and the fourth branch, —that being the media[that] uncovered this abuse — and the judicial branch has so far confirmed that the executive is violating our rights.”
Under President Joe Biden’s Administration, the DHS has spent taxpayer dollars on a number of anti-American efforts. One of its financed “efforts” included the infamous “Pyramid of Far Right Radicalization” (which Hageman also brought up during the hearing) that sought to smear a number of entities such as Fox News, The Christian Broadcasting Network, the Republican Party, Breitbart News, and MAGA as being comparable to Nazis. The DHS also created the notorious Disinformation Governance Board — the Biden variant of a Ministry of Truth — before abandoning it after major public backlash against its censorship operations.
In her opening remarks, Hageman went after the DHS and other federal entities for their obsessive push to police the speech of American citizens:
“The last three years have been particularly eye-opening as the online censorship widely speculated to be occurring was confirmed through the Twitter Files, the documents produced in Missouri v. Biden (2022) and most notably the oversight work of the Judiciary Committee and our select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”
The Wyoming representative made clear that she would not stand for the federal government outsourcing its anti-free speech objectives to private organizations to circumvent the First Amendment. “The Censorship Industrial Complex is entrenched in our federal agencies and even in the White House itself. It coerces, threatens, funds, and cooperates with private entities to monitor, suppress and remove speech which does not fit its preferred political narrative,” Hageman said before calling for a “federal right” for citizens to seek “redress” against officials who have violated their rights.
Hageman wasn’t alone in calling for the federal government to finally be restricted from flirting with the violation of Americans’ rights to free speech.
Later in the hearing, Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) also spoke up in favor of Hageman’s bill, ripping into Biden’s agencies for their abuse of power. Armstrong said, “When we have agencies spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to filter it through the system to censor true information, not only is that a violation of the First Amendment, but it is incredibly condescending."
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
